My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Virginia Woolf (1882): This Perpetual Revision of Thought

19 Virginia Woolf This Perpetual Revision of Thought Brian Teare —hesitant, I write a sentence, erase it, then hesitate, hover above my thoughts about her, unsure where to begin, and begin again. To write about her directly seems impossible. To begin anywhere, to choose any one detail with which to introduce her biography, would give her away too cheaply, oversimplify her, though were I to choose one story to tell, I’d dramatize the dichotomy between the “Virginia Woolf” of the public eye and Woolf’s own interior experience of being a writer. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been thinking about her life and work for over a decade; perhaps it’s that I’ve read almost everything she lived to publish in addition to the writing her relatives released posthumously—her habit of 20 thought no longer seems separate from mine. Within my own life, she continues to live a life that, though dependent on mine, nonetheless seems independent of it. “I am interested in how Virginia Woolf’s image generates custody battles over who gets to define her meaning,” writes Brenda R. Silver in her marvelous study Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). “This includes . . . those who insist on . . . an ‘authentic,’ legitimate Virginia Woolf to whom, they assert, they have a direct line” (5). And if Woolf is iconic it’s because that to those who adore her, a diva is always already an icon in the senses the etymology of eikon suggests. Greek for “likeness, image, similitude,” eikon later came to be ikon, a highly stylized image of an Orthodox saint or holy figure, and also icon, a rhetorical term for simile. A diva is foremost a simile: a goddess in the way that diva is Latin for “goddess.” To suggest, however, that my attraction to and respect for her work is solely a form of worship would be misleading: first, it would diminish her role in my intellectual and emotional life by couching it in a too-reductive metaphor; second, I’m interested in her as much for our commonalities as for our differences. And if I see myself in her, isn’t that because a simile is a kind of mirror, a likeness? After all, she was the one to write, “All interesting people are egoists, perhaps; but it is not in itself desirable”; it was Wayne Koestenbaum—a gay man—who wrote, “Narcissism doesn’t seem silly when a diva practices it” (The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, & the Mystery of Desire [New York: Poseidon Press, 1993], 86). Were I forced to introduce her biography, I might make a point of saying that, as a woman born in 1882 to the educated middle class, Vir ginia Woolf 21 she was denied access to the formal education her brothers, Thoby and Adrian, were given. As the daughter of literary Victorian Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of Dictionary of National Biography and friend to Henry James and other luminaries, she was given private lessons and access to her father’s books, both of which served as her writer’s education; however, as a privately and, she thought, quite imperfectly educated “educated man’s daughter,” as a younger sister trying to keep up with her older brother Thoby’s classical education, she was highly sensitized to the fact a private education taught her to read not only books, but the world itself, and that the lesson she learned was a gendered one invisible to the men around her. Wednesday, October 23rd, 1929 I will here sum up my impressions before publishing A Room of One’s Own . . . there is a shrill feminine tone in it which my intimate friends will dislike. I forecast, then, that I shall get no criticism, except of the evasive, jocular kind . . . also I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist . . . (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary [London: Hogarth Press, 1965], 148) And if I had to risk one metaphor with which to inscribe our relationship , it would be this: she has over time become my teacher, a role not incompatible with that of the diva whose voice “sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener’s body,” Koestenbaum writes in The Queen’s Throat. “Listening, your heart is in your throat” (42). What he means, I think, is that a diva teaches by presenting herself as both goad and goal; by example...